The very opposite of freedom is cliche, and nothing is less free, more inert with convention and hollow brutality, than a row of four-letter words.

The capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being, is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions, and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside.

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a homeland.

The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.

It is no mere accident (as Orwell knew) that the standardization of sexual life, either through controlled license or compelled puritanism, should accompany totalitarian politics.